Writer's Toolbox For Building Arguments
Writing Strategy: Choosing and Refining Your Strategies to Accommodate Your Audience


The following questions can help you refine your sense of audience and zero in on the most effective ways to handle your audience's resistance.

1.  

Is your intended audience supportive, neutral, or hostile toward your claim?

2.  

Are you addressing one audience or multiple audiences? Should you consider limiting the purpose of your argument to focus on one audience?

3.  

What overall strategies are you planning to use to reach your audience: one-sided or multi-sided argument? classical argument, argument with a delayed-thesis, or Rogerian argument?

4.  

What would be a fair summary of opposing views on your issue?

5.  

Which opposing views will you refute? Which points will you concede? If you have to concede points, how will you shift the argument back to your values?

6.  

Which rebuttal strategies (denying the validity of data, citing counterexamples, casting doubt on evidence, and questioning testimonies, quotations or interpretations of statistical data) will you use?

7.  

Would humor enliven your argument and soften up your audience?

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